ISF’s Tenth Annual Banquet this October! SOLD OUT

WE ARE SOLD OUT!

Join us on October 6th to honor the dedicated Muslim women activists and government officials who serve our country: Representative Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and ISF scholarship recipient, Aisha Yaqoob.

The guest speakers of this evening represent hundreds of Muslim women who have dedicated their life to serving the community, protecting our civil rights and ensuring equal representation in all walks of life, including politics.

Representative Ilhan Omar-Born in Somalia, Ilhan and her family fled the country’s civil war when she was eight-years-old. They lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years before coming to the United States, eventually settling in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis in 1997.
Ilhan’s interest in politics began at the age of 14 when she was as an interpreter for her grandfather at local DFL caucuses. Watching neighbors come together to advocate for change at the grassroots level made Ilhan fall in love with the democratic process.
As a student at Edison High School in Minneapolis, she became an organizer and has been a coalition builder ever since. She worked as a community educator at the University of Minnesota and has been a devoted progressive activist in the DFL party for many years. Before running for office, Ilhan was a Humphrey Policy Fellow and served as a senior Policy Aide for a Minneapolis City Council Member. Through advocacy work with which she’s been involved, she’s advanced important issues, including support for working families, educational access, environmental protection, and racial equity.
In 2016, Ilhan became the first Somali-American, Muslim legislator in the United States. With the help of her committed campaign team, they increased voter turnout by 37%. She was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in District 60B, where she’s lived for the past 20 years and where she and her husband Ahmed are raising their three children.https://www.ilhanomar.com/about/
—-Rashida Tlaib is the mother of two boys and the oldest of 14 children, born and raised in Detroit. She is a proud graduate of Detroit Public Schools and the daughter of Palestinian immigrant parents. Rashida made history in 2008 by winning her race for State Representative and becoming the first Muslim woman to ever serve in the Michigan Legislature. Rashida served three terms, rising to the Democratic Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, where she restored and secured millions of dollars for free health clinics, lead abatement, Meals on Wheels programs for seniors, before and after-school programs, and education funding. She authored laws to protect homeowners from fraudulent mortgage bankers and tax preparers and to stop scrap metal thieves from looting Detroit’s abandoned homes and even destroying occupied properties.
Rashida provided transformative constituent services, saving hundreds of families from losing their homes to foreclosure, securing over $1 million in tax refunds by providing her working-class residents with free tax preparation, and connecting seniors to grant money to help weatherize their homes and save on energy bills.
While Democrats are looking for leaders who will stand up to Donald Trump and our nation’s most pressing problems, Rashida has an unparalleled record fighting for her constituents and her values, taking on billionaires and multinational corporations, and winning. Rashida took on the Koch brothers and forced them to remove pollutants from Detroit’s riverfront and she led a We Have the Right to Breathe campaign that led to a comprehensive cancer study in the shadow of Marathon Oil’s refinery expansion. Rashida fought back against Matty Moroun when his Ambassador Bridge Company was illegally routing polluting semi-trucks onto neighborhood streets and forced his company to follow the law.

When families get to know Rashida, they have no doubt that she will work tirelessly to knock down barriers for real change, and whether by policy or by action, she will roll up her sleeves to make sure her residents are cared for, no matter how big the challenge. This is what sets Rashida apart from the crowd.https://www.rashidaforcongress.com/about
—Aisha Yaqoob, an ISF scholarship recipient, is a professional advocate for immigrant rights at the state Capitol, working with legislators on both sides of the aisle to push for civil rights for immigrants and people of color. She is currently the Democratic nominee for Georgia House District 97 which includes parts of Northern Gwinnett county. As policy director for a nonprofit legal and advocacy center, Aisha monitors local, state, and federal policies that affect immigrants and works to fight for their rights. Aisha is actively involved in her community. She was a co-organizer of Atlanta March for Social Justice & Women, has participated in the Gwinnett Citizens Academy (Fall 2016 Cohort) and served on the Advisory Committee for the Downtown Suwanee Redevelopment Commission (2014-2015).

We’ll also hear from:

Dr. Dalia Fahmy is an assistant professor of Political Science at Long Island University where she teachers courses on US foreign Policy, World Politics, International Relations, Causes of War, and Politics of the Middle East. Dr. Fahmy’s current research looks at the changing role of Islamists in the democratic future of the Middle East.
Dr. Fahmy has two books in the works that look at the future of political Islam and the role of liberalism in the Middle East. She has published several articles in academic journals focusing on democratization and most recently on the affects of Islamophobia on US foreign policy. She has been interviewed by and written opeds in various media outlets including ABC, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and appears often on Aljazeera.
Dr. Fahmy has won several academic awards and fellowships for her research. In 2014, Dr. Fahmy was one of the recipients of the prestigious Kleigman Prize in Political Science. And this year was awarded the Newton Prize for excellence. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy.https://islamicscholarshipfund.org/board-of-directors/
—Dr. Maha Hilal is the co-Director of Justice for Muslims Collective where she focuses on political education addressing institutionalized Islamophobia. Previously, she was the inaugural Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. where she published multiple articles in Al Jazeera, US News, Newsweek, and others on the the consequences of the War on Terror on the Muslim community. Dr. Hilal is also an organizer with Witness Against Torture and a Council member of the School of the Americas Watch. She earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, D.C. The title of her dissertation is “Too damn Muslim to be trusted”: The War on Terror and the Muslim American response. She received her Master’s Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For more information to volunteer or to sponsor the event, please contact Jehan Hakim at contact@IslamicScholarshipFund.org